Fresh from the factory, none of the rockets in Batukhtin’s battery had been fired yet, even in training, and even though there was nothing more patriotic than the defense of the motherland, they were not likely to be fired on May Day.
“The siren sounded soon after eight o’clock,” he remembers. “It seemed like a normal training alarm, but that made no difference. The same actions were required of us. We had six minutes to run to our stations and check our equipment. That was the time limit set by our government. They believed that any more than six minutes would allow the intruder to escape.
“We checked our equipment, then we waited. Nothing happened. We sat there in the cabin and no one said anything. There was no message from our commander, so we sat there in complete silence for nearly an hour. Then Chelyabinsk gave us the coordinates and we switched on our target acquisition radar. At nine o’clock our commander announced there was an enemy aircraft in the sky.”
* * *
Thirteen miles up is a hard place to imagine. If you could drive there, it would be the end point of a straight thirteen-mile drive away from planet Earth. Thirteen miles is five Matterhorns, or forty-four Sears Towers, and there is almost nothing when you get there; so little atmosphere to absorb and deflect the sun’s rays that they will feel hot through a pressure suit even though the outside temperature may be as low as –160 degrees Celsius; so little pressure that the human body requires as much protection as in a perfect vacuum. The view is a different matter. The very few people who have seen it say that looking upward they saw a ring of the purest blue deepening nearly to black, while the view down is both humbling and mysterious. It is vast—four hundred miles in every direction—but at the same time reveals the planet in its true, curved, intimate state.
From thirteen miles up even giant cumulonimbus are a whole Everest below and look like cotton candy. The only big clouds this high up are H-bomb clouds. This is above the weather, above the jet stream, above almost all wind noise, since wind is air. It is still a quick free fall back to Earth—about six minutes, since the first forty thousand feet will be very quick indeed—and still a long way below outer space. But thirteen miles up is implacably hostile to life all the same. It is 29,000 feet above the point where human bodily fluids start boiling of their own accord.
To go there gently in a balloon is one thing, and even this proved so fraught with surprises that it killed a series of brave pioneers who tried it in the first half of the twentieth century. To go there in a pressurized cockpit with 450 knots of forward motion is quite another, since if the cockpit breaks up or the canopy pops open the cockpit-sized gas bubble that it contained will be gone in no time, its molecules violently and instantly pulled away from one another and redistributed around the stratosphere too thinly to measure, while the pilot, if conscious, will experience a loss of heat and pressure more sudden than any earthbound machine can simulate. Moreover, whatever happens next will happen fast. He could go into a spin, or lose his head to hypoxia or a passing aileron, or just lose his head. Or he could get lucky and survive those first few seconds and have a moment to begin to think.
From the moment he approved its construction, President Eisenhower was haunted by the idea of a U-2 going down in Russia. He forecast very specifically that if it happened in the midst of superpower negotiations the plane “could be put on display in Moscow and ruin my effectiveness.” The plane’s champions were adamant that even if it did happen he could deny all knowledge because the pilot would not survive to talk. He would almost certainly die in any midair explosion, they said. If by chance he survived that, he would not be expected to survive the fall. If by some miracle he survived that, they intimated, he would, with luck, have the decency to kill himself or go quietly to the execution the enemy would presumably insist on, in the tradition of the American revolutionary hero Nathan Hale, hanged for spying against the British in 1776.
They were wrong on all counts. Not one but two pilots showed it was possible to survive a midair U-2 catastrophe. On a training flight in 1956 Bob Ericson’s oxygen supply ran low because of a leak, leaving him hypoxic and groggy as he sailed over Arizona on his way back to Groom Lake. His judgment impaired, he forgot that the U-2 liked to be flown slightly nose up to control its speed. He put it into a shallow dive, picked up too much speed, and regained full consciousness when the machine spontaneously disintegrated around him at 28,000 feet. He did not need to eject since there was nothing left to eject from, and his parachute opened automatically at 15,000 feet.
On another training flight, this time over Texas, Colonel Jack Nole punched out at 53,000 feet and lived. It was in September 1957, a banner month for U-2s over Russia and a hot one in Texas, though not at 53,000 feet, where during routing flight checks Nole’s flaps either froze or stuck fully extended as if for landing. This put him into a near-vertical dive as if off the first hill of a monstrous roller coaster but with no good end in view. He reported that he had lost his tail and was ordered to abandon ship, which he was already trying to do, though in truth what followed was not the type of punching out that had earned the process grudging affection among fighter jocks. All they had to do was make one big decision and give one big pull on a cinch ring between their legs. Nole had to unscrew his oxygen tube and his radio wire with stiff, fat gloves fully inflated to prevent the skin and blood vessels on the backs of his hands from distending like blown bubble gum. Then he had to shimmy out of his harness with his torso clamped in a pressure-suit bear hug and pop the canopy by hand. It would have been awkward at ground level. At fifty thousand feet and falling it was that old air force pilot’s temptress—the lethal invitation to panic.
Nole declined the invitation. He wrestled free of the plane and for a few seconds fell next to it, faceplate frosting up in the sudden Siberian cold, limbs stiff despite the onrush of thickening air, thinking. He had a choice to make concerning his parachute. Pulling the rip cord would start oxygen flowing to his helmet from an emergency supply in his seat pack. But assuming it deployed correctly, it would also take about one hundred miles per hour off his downward velocity, and he was still so high that he might freeze solid on such a leisurely descent. (Who knew? No one had bailed out from this high before.) The alternative was to keep free-falling, but with nothing to breathe. He pulled the chute.
Nole did not freeze, but he did swing violently and throw up. His escape, like Ericson’s, tended to indicate that death was not in fact a “given” in the event of a U-2 disintegration. More particularly it showed that falling from such a long way up did at least give the self-possessed pilot time for a rational review of his options, and it confirmed that David Clark’s pressure suits did what was claimed of them—at least at fifty thousand feet.
But fifty thousand feet was not seventy thousand feet. Would the suit hold up in a true worst-case scenario? The air force was anxious to know. It did not send a U-2 all the way up to its operational ceiling for the express purpose of falling apart, but it did send up a series of balloons—the magnificent gossamer helium bubbles code-named Excelsior I, II, and III that took Captain Joe Kittinger to the edge of space.
Kittinger had much in common with Gary Powers. He wrestled with alligators as a teenager and raced speedboats in Florida as a young man. In the air force he showed the requisite nervelessness when climbing into the flying bricks that passed for fighter planes in the early cold war, but he also showed a very human vulnerability at moments of great stress.
In Excelsior I, in November 1959, he soared to 75,000 feet over New Mexico, then jumped. He blacked out while free-falling in a spin but came to on the ground. The next month he did it again from 74,000 feet and remained conscious all the way down. In August 1960 he set a record that still stands by parachuting from 102,000 feet—twenty miles; four Everests—in so many layers of protective clothing that he looked like a teddy bear. On the way up he nearly lost his cool when the sight of a thick layer of cloud below, separating him from his support team, brought him “face to face with a
stark and maddening loneliness.” But he was soon the picture of nonchalance again. He told Time magazine that for the first part of his fall he was on his back looking up at a starry sky (it was 7:00 a.m.) with “a sensation of lying still while the balloon raced away from me.” In fact he was accelerating to 614 miles per hour, five times terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere.
On each flight Kittinger’s descent was supposed to be controlled by an ingenious sequence of parachutes: drogue, pilot, main canopy, reserve pilot, reserve main canopy. On the first flight four of the five had become fouled around his neck and body and one another. On the third the right glove of his pressure suit failed and his hand expanded to twice its normal size. But the key piece of data from all three flights for anyone interested in the likely fate of a pilot forced into an extremely high-altitude bailout was that his main pressure suit, the tensile preserver of his brain and vital organs, worked flawlessly each time. And each time, at Kittinger’s insistence, it was David Clark’s standard issue. Eisenhower’s “given”—the dead, mute U-2 pilot—was being meticulously resurrected by well-intentioned people under his command who reasonably assumed that their main task was to keep pilots alive.
As for the suicide scenario, no one had thought it through. No one had actually talked about suicide with the president either, because so many euphemisms were available—euphemisms echoed by Eisenhower in his memoirs: “I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open,” he wrote, “motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado and certain material inducements.”
Patriotism was the key word, of course—priceless, immeasurable, sufficient justification for almost anything. But quite apart from the fact that, as Joe Murphy pointed out, there was “never an instruction” that pilots take their own lives, it was never clear in what circumstances a pilot might choose to do so out of patriotism. He might take the L pill as an alternative to torture, but that was different. Did those who invoked Nathan Hale in fact expect a stricken U-2 pilot to take the pill before hitting the ground? While still in the cockpit, perhaps, but after setting the timer on the two-pound explosive charge behind his seat to ensure that no camera or film fell into enemy hands? Or after ejecting, on that long fall to Earth, when the serenity of the heavens and the crisp, thin air of the upper troposphere would combine to reveal the right choice for the good American, who would then reach with gloved hand into the tight outer pocket of his pressure suit, retrieve the pill, and somehow pop it and breathe his last, undistracted by screaming survival instincts or questions about what might actually happen were he to land alive? Not then? Perhaps not. Certainly, standing orders for American officers during the Second World War and since required them to try to escape if captured. Suicide would preclude that. It would also waste the pilots’ training at the agency farm in Maryland with the simulated Soviet border. Perhaps the pill was to be kept handy against the dread moment of capture during an escape attempt, when torture and execution were surely to follow in short order. But what if, in fact, he was captured and not tortured, like Hale himself? In that event the pilot might gradually allow himself to hope he might survive. At what point during the emergence of that hope was he expected to put it aside and put his country first? At what point was he finally and irrevocably to reject the possibility that he might be able to withhold from his captors any information that they could use against his country and at the same time stay alive? At what point was he to reject that possibility and kill himself? There was a lot to think about if you were invited to take a mental stroll down the road marked “worst-case scenarios,” but the U-2 pilots never were. Nor did those who gave their orders trouble to take the stroll on their behalf.
* * *
When Gary Powers took off in November 1956 on the first overflight of Soviet territory from Turkey, he did not know about Ericson’s trouble over Arizona or Nole’s over Texas or Kittinger’s balloon jumps; they hadn’t happened yet. But he did know about what had happened. He was flying-safety officer for lonely Detachment B, and even though the agency had not yet supplied it with water skis or speed boat, it supplied Powers with U-2 accident reports from wherever they happened, whenever they happened, in the hope that the detachment might learn from others’ mistakes.
So Powers knew better than most U-2 pilots what could go wrong. He knew, for instance, that his good friend Marty Knutson had stalled and spun at twenty thousand feet in training over Groom Lake and had not bailed out only because his canopy had jammed shut. (Knutson managed to recover from the spin.) He knew that a pilot who had followed him to the ranch had died there trying to shake one of the U-2’s detachable stabilisers off his wingtip after it failed to drop away automatically. (The Lockheed people decided that too much fuel must have rushed to one wingtip in a tight turn, making the plane impossible to balance.) He knew about Frank Grace’s death, also at the ranch, and unlike Grace’s friends from Malmstrom who flew to Texas for the funeral, he was allowed to know how it had happened. (Grace climbed too steeply on takeoff after dark and stalled fifty feet off the ground. His left wingtip dipped and snagged the lake bed, throwing the plane into a cartwheel that ended when it hit a pylon.) And he knew about Howard Carey. Powers and Carey had trained together at Watertown, but Carey had been sent to Germany instead of Turkey. He was returning from an overflight of Eastern Europe when a Canadian-manned early-warning station in France picked him up high over central Poland. The Canadians took him to be an intruder and scrambled four of their own CF-86 Sabre Jets to intercept him. Carey was easy prey: relieved to be back in Western airspace, he descended quickly toward Wiesbaden. Two of the Sabre Jets took up positions on his wingtips and a third behind him. The visitor was unmarked and unrecognizable and did not respond when invited to identify himself. Flight Lieutenant John McElroy armed his guns but never fired them; the U-2 had already fallen apart in the turbulence created by the Sabre Jets.
Other explanations have been offered for Carey’s death, but this is the fullest and most plausible. Richard Bissell, the U-2’s most ardent fan in Washington, would never have said he found it reassuring, but he did cite it in 1960 as evidence that the U-2 would “pretty much break up in a mishap.”
To know the U-2’s weaknesses so intimately would have exposed an imaginative pilot to paralyzing fear. No one ever accused Powers of being too imaginative. When he saw his first MiG contrails, peering into his drift sight while sailing over Baku on the morning of November 20, 1957, he trusted that the MiGs wouldn’t be able to reach him and flew on. (He counted fifty-six Soviet fighters in the sky below him that day.) When his electrics malfunctioned over Yerevan he calmly rerouted himself home via Mount Ararat, cutting out a detour to Tbilisi. This time he reached Adana in one piece and had his long martini.
* * *
In Turkey they drank gin martinis, never mind the Rat Pack and its predilection for vodka. Turkey wasn’t Vegas. The PX at Adana sold fine British Beefeaters flown in from Wiesbaden and not much else in the liquor department, and the U-2 boys developed a certain loyalty to it.
They had plenty of time. That first flight by Powers was the only true overflight of Soviet territory by Detachment B in its first nine months at Adana. Had American taxpayers known, they might have vented their indignation over the U-2 pilots’ thirty thousand dollars in annual pay much earlier than they did—and it was true that Powers’s fifteen dollars per operational mile flown over that nine-month period was a handsome rate by any standards. Even so, it is hard with hindsight to argue that it was not deserved.
Of the era’s three military-trained airborne elites, the most famous—the Mercury astronauts—risked their lives and undertook genuinely historic missions but did not actually fly. As Tom Wolfe put it, they sat on top of an enormous roman candle and waited for someone to light the fuse. The fighter jocks did all their own flying, but never into the bear’s lair; unlike Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, they never went toe to toe with the Russkies. Only the U-
2 pilots did both. They did not ask to be killing time on the concrete outside Adana, and they didn’t much like it. Three of them were sent home for want of anything to do, and the stay-behinds started saying that the place existed because the world needed an enema. Month after month the decrypted orders from project HQ to the wireless hut read “as you are,” or words to that effect. During the Suez crisis in 1956 there was plenty of operational flying over the Middle East, but after that most U-2 flights from Adana were test flights over Turkey or “ferret runs” along the northern edge of the Black Sea to test the Soviets’ reactions. Even these were rare because the U-2 did not seem to have been built to last and no one wanted to wear it out. “No one thought the operation would last long,” Joe Murphy says. The truth was, no one knew, but Richard Bissell was darned if he was going to let it fizzle out, which was one reason why Jim Cherbonneaux found himself ripping frantically at the main front zipper of his pressure suit on the scorching afternoon of August 22, 1957.
Cherbonneaux was one of those ordered to stay behind. He had trained with Powers, deployed with Powers to Turkey, and then suddenly packed up and moved again with most of the detachment to a borrowed hangar outside Lahore in Pakistan. By the time his black plane dropped quietly through the haze that afternoon, flaps fully extended and compressors idling in the hot, humid air, Cherbonneaux was beyond desperate. He had been airborne for nine hours and acutely aware of his bladder for an hour and a half. He would have soaked his long johns if he could, but when he tried he felt only agonizing spasms. As the aircraft rolled to a stop in an out-of-the-way corner of the airfield, two technicians pulled alongside with a step ladder to open the canopy and help the pilot out. But he was practically out already, scrambling from the cockpit as if on fire. He had three layers to get through—outer suit, pressure suit, and those long johns. Moments later, he told Ben Rich, “not heeding privacy, I set a new world record on that tarmac.”
Bridge of Spies Page 15
